A Rs 17,000-crore-plus tunnel road was meant to cut Bengaluru’s commute times. Instead, it ran into a three-billion-year-old rock — and a government now scrambling to find another way through. EdPublica visits Lalbagh Botanical Garden and speaks to the people who walk through it every day.The Lalbagh tunnel road has become the clearest test yet of how far public pressure can move a government once a decision looks final.

It is early morning at Lalbagh’s West Gate, and walkers are already streaming in — no ticket needed at this hour, the entry stays free until nine. Somewhere past the bougainvillea, the Rose Garden is waking up in the mist, and a flock of parakeets is making its usual racket around the glasshouse. For most of the people filing in, this is simply the start of another day — a walk, a stretch, a bit of quiet before Bengaluru’s traffic takes over. Few of them are thinking about what lies beneath their feet: a proposed ten-lane road tunnel that, on paper, was meant to run straight through this ground.

The autorickshaw driver who dropped this reporter near the gate had his own way of putting it. He’d seen the protest that filled the park on a Sunday morning not long ago — thousands of people, banners, a human chain stretching around the old rock. He didn’t have strong views either way about tunnels and traffic, he said, but he’d noticed something: when the government backed down on the law that triggered it all, and signalled it might route the project around the garden instead of under it, people he spoke to seemed relieved. Since then, he said, he’d been getting more fares to Lalbagh than usual — visitors curious, it seemed, about the garden that had been all over the news.

Rajendar, who lives in Jigani on the city’s southern edge and drives roughly ninety minutes to visit, put it more simply. He comes for the green, he said — for a couple of hours where the air feels different, away from the concrete and the horns. A garden like this, he felt, was not something the city had many more of to spare.

Not everyone was willing to be named. A corporate employee, mid-morning break, walking briskly along the lake path, agreed to talk only on condition of anonymity. His view was blunt: whatever the traffic problem is, running infrastructure like this under a garden like Lalbagh is not the way to solve it. The government, he said, needs to reconsider — and find a fix that doesn’t ask a 240-acre lung space to absorb the cost.

A garden older than the city’s traffic problem

Lalbagh’s story predates the automobile by more than a century. Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, laid it out in 1760 as a private garden modelled partly on Mughal design; his son Tipu Sultan expanded it with plants brought back from campaigns and trading contacts across the region. British superintendents took over after, adding the glasshouse in 1890 — built, like much of the era’s civic architecture, in conscious echo of London’s Crystal Palace — and the garden has hosted its twin flower shows around Republic Day and Independence Day ever since.

Today it holds more than 1,850 plant species across 240 acres, including a roughly 250-year-old silk cotton tree said to date to Tipu Sultan’s time, and the Lalbagh Rock — a granite-gneiss outcrop now estimated by geologists to be about three billion years old, among the oldest exposed rock formations anywhere on the peninsula. A watchtower built during the reign of Kempegowda II sits on it. Campaigners have been pushing to have the rock considered for UNESCO recognition, in the same conversation as sites like Hampi.

That rock, and the ground around it, is precisely what the tunnel road project has to pass through.

Lalbagh’s fight is, in that sense, a small and very local chapter of a much bigger story. UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2024 found that the average share of green space in cities worldwide fell from 19.5 per cent in 1990 to just 13.9 per cent by 2020 — and the decline has been sharper still in this part of the world, with East and Southeast Asia’s urban green cover dropping from 32.5 per cent to 18.6 per cent over the same period. Every city loses its green space to something that looks, at the time, like a reasonable trade-off — a road, a housing block, a transit line. Bengaluru’s version of that trade-off currently runs 50 to 100 feet under a botanical garden.

What the Lalbagh Tunnel Road Project actually proposes

The Bengaluru Tunnel Road — sometimes called the Twin Tunnel Road — is planned to run 16.5 to 16.75 kilometres between Hebbal in the north and Central Silk Board in the south, largely beneath the Outer Ring Road corridor. Its cost has been quoted at different points as roughly INR 17,000 crore, INR17,698 crore and, more recently, INR 22,267 crore, after Adani Group entities were reported to have won the contract. As originally designed, the alignment required roughly six acres of Lalbagh land — most of it temporary, during construction — for two entry and exit ramps and a ventilation shaft, with one ramp passing within a few hundred metres of Lalbagh Lake and another running close to the rock formation itself, at depths of 50 to 100 feet.

What the reports found

Three separate technical reports have shaped the debate, and none of them offer the government much comfort.

A Geotechnical Interpretative Report prepared for the city’s civic body by Rodic Consultants, dated September 2024, flagged the Lalbagh stretch as a “bedrock transition zone” and noted a geological lineament — a fault-like feature — crossing the proposed alignment near the lake, along with risks of groundwater seepage and seasonal water-table shifts.

A Geological Survey of India expert committee went further. Its report, submitted to the government in April 2026, warned that tunnelling and blasting near the rock could widen existing cracks, destabilise parts of the formation, and disturb groundwater flows into Lalbagh Lake — and separately flagged risk to the historic Kempegowda watchtower. GSI also noted civil-society efforts to have the rock nominated as a UNESCO site.

A third, independent study — by the Sustainable Transportation Lab at the Indian Institute of Science, led by Professor Ashish Verma — questioned the project’s basic logic rather than its geology. Modelling suggested the tunnel would carry only around 1,200 passengers per hour per direction, against roughly 69,000 for a nine-coach metro line built at comparable cost; in a high-toll scenario, the study projected the tunnel’s volume-to-capacity ratio could fall as low as 0.1 — a road built for far more traffic than would likely use it. The same analysis suggested the project could, in some scenarios, add to the city’s overall emissions rather than cut them, by drawing commuters away from mass transit and towards private cars.

The law that lit the fuse

If one thing turned this from a planning dispute into a street movement, it was a single piece of legislation.

The Karnataka Government Parks (Preservation) (Amendment) Bill, 2026, amends a 1975 law that has, until now, given government parks and gardens fairly strong statutory protection. The amendment inserts a new provision allowing the state to “alienate” — that is, sell, lease, gift, exchange, mortgage or otherwise transfer — up to 5 per cent of the total area of any government park or garden in Karnataka, for specified public infrastructure and utility projects. Applied to a 240-acre site like Lalbagh, that threshold works out to roughly 12 acres, twice what the tunnel’s original design was reported to need.

The government’s case is that the change is generic policy, not a Lalbagh-specific fix: Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar has said it is meant to enable ordinary public works, such as road-widening, without the cost and delay of separately acquiring private land, and that the provision does not open parkland to private developers — land can only be leased, transferred or exchanged to government departments, statutory authorities and local bodies. Critics were not persuaded. The Bill was cleared by the Cabinet and passed by both Houses of the legislature on 24 August 2026 amid opposition protests inside the Assembly and, its critics say, with little substantive debate — timing that, coming as the tunnel’s alignment through Lalbagh was already under challenge in court, read to many as a legislative route around the garden’s protections rather than a coincidence.

How the fight unfolded

The reaction outside the legislature was faster than the government seemed to expect. Within three days of the Bill’s passage, more than 200 citizens, resident groups and environmental organisations gathered at Lalbagh on 27 August to form a human chain around the ancient rock, demanding the amendment be withdrawn. That Sunday, 30 August, the numbers swelled into the thousands for a march titled “Walk in Lalbagh, Walk for Lalbagh” — residents, walkers’ associations, cycling groups and pro-Kannada organisations alongside Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya, Union Minister Shobha Karandlaje and other BJP lawmakers, plus veteran environmentalist A.N. Yellappa Reddy. Marchers sat and lay across the Peninsular Gneiss rock itself and raised slogans in Kannada and English with a common refrain: not one inch of Lalbagh.

The mobilisation built on opposition that had already been running for months through the courts — public-interest litigation in the Karnataka High Court led in part by theatre personality Prakash Belawadi and civic figures including Adikesavalu Ravindra and N.S. Mukunda, and an earlier, smaller human chain in early August aimed specifically at protecting the geological monument from the tunnel.

Facing that pressure, and with BJP leaders petitioning the Governor to withhold assent to the Bill, the state Cabinet withdrew it within days, on 3 September 2026. Shivakumar said the legislation would be reintroduced later, after wider public consultation — it has not been dropped for good. A week after that, on 9 September, he went a step further and said he had asked Greater Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda to study alternatives to using Lalbagh land for the tunnel. That is an instruction to examine options, not a decision to reroute — no revised alignment has been published, and the original six-acre land requirement, the detailed project report and the tender awarded to Adani entities all remain officially in force.

Several petitioners have said they intend to keep challenging the project on transport and procedural grounds regardless of what happens to the amendment or the alignment. Their case — over the withheld 2025 expert report, the missing environmental impact assessment and questions about statutory transport-authority approvals — is due back before the Karnataka High Court in December.

A retreat, not a resolution

For now, the garden itself shows no sign of the fight above and around it. The lake is calm, the rock still draws its usual scatter of visitors reading the noticeboard about its age, and the morning walkers keep coming. What has shifted is something real but narrower than it looks: a government caught off guard by how fast a legislative manoeuvre turned into a mass protest, and forced into a public climbdown within ten days of passing a law.

That is not the same as Lalbagh being safe. The amendment is shelved, not repealed, and Shivakumar has said it will return after “consultation.” The instruction to study a route around the garden is exactly that — a study, with no published alternative and no change yet to the project’s land requirement, tender or contractor. The Geological Survey of India’s warnings about the rock, the watchtower and the groundwater, submitted in April and made public only in September, have not been formally answered. And the oldest thread of opposition — the court case over how the project was tendered and cleared in the first place — continues in December, indifferent to whichever way the alignment eventually bends.

So the honest answer, for Rajendar driving in from Jigani, or for the corporate employee unwilling to give his name, is not that they won. It is that a fight most people assumed was already lost turned out not to be — and that the next few months, in a courtroom and in a minister’s office rather than at a human chain, will decide whether that counts for anything.

For most people, the world map is something so familiar that it rarely gets questioned. Africa sits roughly in the middle. Europe is above it. India is to the east. Greenland appears surprisingly large. Russia stretches across an enormous section of the northern hemisphere. But take the same countries and continents and put them on a globe, or on a map designed to preserve area, and the picture changes. This is the idea behind Equal Earth, a map projection designed to represent countries and continents according to their relative land area.

Greenland shrinks. Africa becomes much larger. Europe occupies far less space than many classroom maps suggest. The northern parts of the world lose some of the visual dominance they acquire on conventional maps.

The projection has gained new attention after the United Nations General Assembly backed a resolution encouraging the use of equal-area world maps. The resolution, led by Togo and supported by 164 countries, promotes Equal Earth as a more representative way of showing the size of the world’s landmasses. The important part of the story, however, is not that a new map has suddenly appeared. Equal Earth was created eight years ago. What has changed is the attention being given to the idea behind it.

Map: Round Earth Without Making Compromises

The Earth is roughly spherical. A conventional map is flat. That creates a problem that cartographers have dealt with for centuries: flattening a globe inevitably changes something. A map can preserve area, but distort shape. It can preserve direction, but distort size. It can attempt to balance several forms of distortion, but cannot eliminate all of them.

The famous Mercator projection is a good example. Developed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, it was designed primarily for navigation. Its great advantage was that it preserved angles and made it easier for sailors to plot courses using compass bearings. It was not designed to show the relative size of countries. Yet the projection became one of the most familiar representations of the world.

That creates some striking visual differences. On a Mercator map, areas become increasingly enlarged towards the poles. Greenland therefore appears vastly larger than it really is relative to Africa. In reality, Africa covers about 30.4 million square kilometres, while Greenland covers about 2.2 million square kilometres. Africa is roughly 14 times larger.

A map cannot change that geographical fact. But the projection used to draw it can make the difference difficult to see.

Equal Earth Starts With a Different Question

Instead of asking how to preserve direction, Equal Earth asks a different question: What if the area occupied by a country on the map should correspond to its actual area on Earth? That is what makes it an equal-area projection.

Equal Earth was introduced in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. Their objective was to create an equal-area world map that was also visually balanced and suitable for general use. The projection was inspired partly by the Robinson projection, but unlike Robinson, it preserves the relative size of areas. The result looks familiar enough to be recognisable as a world map, but the proportions are different. Africa gets the space its area deserves.

South America appears considerably larger relative to Europe. India and other countries at lower latitudes no longer look as small compared with countries farther north. Greenland is no longer visually comparable with Africa. It stops making Africa look smaller.

What Does “Equal Area” Actually Mean?

It does not mean every country is made the same size.

“Equal” in Equal Earth refers to the preservation of area, not equality between countries. If Country A has twice the land area of Country B, an equal-area projection will preserve that relationship on the map. This becomes particularly useful when maps are being used to compare geographical phenomena.

An equal-area projection prevents the map itself from exaggerating some regions simply because of where they are located on the globe.

Why Does Africa Look So Different?

Africa is at the centre of much of the current discussion because the continent is particularly affected by the distortion of the Mercator projection. Most of Africa lies closer to the equator than Europe, North America and Russia. The farther north or south one moves from the equator, the greater the enlargement becomes on a Mercator map.

As a result, northern countries and territories occupy disproportionately large areas on the map, while Africa appears comparatively compressed.

Mercator’s projection was created for navigation in the 16th century. Its distortions are a consequence of the mathematical properties that make it useful for that purpose. But once a particular map becomes the dominant image of the world, its visual effects can influence how people understand geographical scale. That is one reason the Equal Earth debate has moved beyond cartography.

Map Can Influence How We Imagine the Planet

A student looking at a world map may not know the actual area of Africa, Greenland or South America. The map becomes the reference point. If Greenland looks almost as large as Africa, the brain absorbs that relationship before a textbook provides the numbers. This is why the choice of projection matters in education.

An equal-area map does not necessarily provide a more useful map for every lesson. But when the lesson is about how much land exists where, preserving area becomes important. The same principle applies to news graphics.

A map showing global temperatures, deforestation or agricultural production can communicate a very different impression depending on the projection used. The projection is therefore part of the information being presented, even when the audience never notices it.

Not a Perfect Picture of Earth either

There is an important misconception to avoid. Equal Earth does not eliminate distortion. No flat map can. Because the Earth is curved, every projection has to compromise somewhere. Equal Earth preserves area, but shapes and distances are not perfectly preserved. That is why cartographers use different projections for different purposes. A navigation chart may benefit from Mercator.

A map comparing the size of continents may benefit from Equal Earth. A map intended to show a general visual impression of the world may use another projection altogether. There is no single map that is mathematically perfect for every purpose.

Why the UN’s Decision Matters

The UN resolution does not legally abolish the Mercator projection. It encourages countries, educational institutions and organisations to consider equal-area alternatives, particularly Equal Earth. The resolution is therefore better understood as a recommendation about representation rather than a global cartographic mandate.

The vote also reflects a broader argument about how geographical knowledge is presented.

Togo and other African countries have argued that the familiar world map does not adequately communicate the actual scale of Africa. The campaign has therefore connected cartographic accuracy with representation and the legacy of how the world has historically been depicted.

The debate is not really about whether Africa should be made to look bigger. It is about whether a map used to teach and communicate geography should give viewers a reasonably accurate impression of the relative size of the world’s landmasses. The next time you see a world map, it is worth asking one question before reading it: What does this map preserve?

The Rasuwa disaster (Nepal flash floods) has killed more than 1,000 people in Nepal and China and left thousands missing. The catastrophe exposes a harder problem than the absence of an alarm: how do you protect communities and infrastructure when mountain hazards can cascade within minutes?

On the morning of August 26, a mass of ice and rock broke loose high in Nepal’s Rasuwa district and plunged roughly 1,200 metres into the valley below. Within minutes, the resulting debris and water surged into the Bhotekoshi River system.

A week later, the scale of the disaster is far clearer and far more devastating than initial reports suggested. Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) has reported 1,050 deaths and 3,916 people missing. China has reported another 16 deaths and 546 missing in the affected area across the border, taking the combined death toll to 1,066. More than 11,800 people have been rescued in Nepal, but the search continues in remote valleys and at damaged hydropower projects. The numbers continue to shift as rescue teams recover bodies and families search for missing relatives.

Nepal flash floods expose the limits of early warning

Researchers analyzing satellite imagery, seismic signals, and video footage say the flood was likely triggered by an ice-rock avalanche rather than a conventional glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF). The distinction matters: while a glacial lake’s water levels and drainage systems can be monitored for early warnings, an unstable mountain slope can fail suddenly, turning a quiet landscape into a debris corridor within minutes.

A disaster that outran the warning system

ICIMOD’s assessment notes that the collapse occurred around 8:37 am Nepal Standard Time, producing a magnitude 5.2 seismic signal. Hydrological data shows how rapidly the event unfolded: water levels on the Trishuli River at Galchchi rose nine metres in just 30 minutes, while levels at Malekhu rose seven metres in a similar window, washing away several monitoring stations in the process.

This highlights a hard reality in disaster management: a warning system is only useful if there is enough lead time to act.

Dr. Farooq Azam, Senior Cryosphere Specialist at ICIMOD, described the Rasuwa event as a sudden-onset hazard with no detection and no time for warnings. Because deep-seated bedrock or sub-glacial instabilities remain invisible to standard surveillance, identifying a failure point in advance is rarely possible. The take-away isn’t that early-warning systems are useless, but rather that they cannot be the sole pillars of Himalayan safety.

From early warning to early preparedness

When casualties run into the thousands, the scope of the problem extends far beyond simple flood management. Nearly 1.6 million people have been affected across a broad area, with extensive destruction to roads, bridges, markets, communications, and power grids. As of September 1, NDRRMA figures show at least 639 hydropower workers missing, while over 21,000 security personnel remain deployed for search and rescue.

When a sudden mountain hazard strikes, built infrastructure often compounds the catastrophe. Destroyed roads delay emergency crews, collapsed bridges isolate entire villages, damaged power plants force dangerous confined-space rescues, and lost monitoring stations blind teams downstream.

Because of this, Azam advocates shifting focus toward long-term resilience: stricter land-use planning, safer infrastructure siting, and public awareness of high-altitude risks. He emphasizes that environmental impact assessments must evaluate how a shifting mountain landscape will affect a project over its entire operational lifetime—not just during construction. Planners can no longer just ask if a bridge or power plant can survive today’s weather; they have to design for conditions 30, 50, or 70 years down the line.

The Himalayas are not a static landscape

While current scientific evidence does not draw a direct line from climate change to this single avalanche, the event occurred within a mountain ecosystem experiencing rapid physical changes.

Glaciological assessments show accelerating mass loss across the Himalayas, with negative mass balance recorded in 89% of observed years over the last five decades. The Hindu Kush Himalaya region has also seen significant 21st-century warming, rising between 0.15°C and 0.60°C per decade.

These shifts ripple through the whole ecosystem. Snow cover patterns are shifting, permafrost is thawing, and slope stability is deteriorating. Thawing permafrost is particularly concerning high up, where frozen ground acts as a natural glue; as it thaws, erosion, landslides, and slope failure increase, directly threatening down-valley infrastructure. Climate change doesn’t need to directly trigger an avalanche to make the entire region significantly more fragile.

Black carbon is another pressure on the cryosphere

Particulate pollution presents another major stressor. A study by Climate Trends found that black carbon concentrations on the Indian side of the Himalayas rose by roughly 7.74% between 2000–09 and 2010–19. The study recorded a notable jump in average snow-surface temperatures, which rose from -11.27°C (2000–09) to -7.13°C (2020–23).

Black carbon darkens snow, reducing its reflectivity and accelerating surface melting. Because mountain ice acts as a natural water reservoir for downstream populations, this melting threatens long-term water security. While black carbon didn’t explicitly cause the Rasuwa slide, it underscores why regional environmental risks must be tackled holistically rather than in isolated hazard buckets.

The problem begins with where we build

Ultimately, the hardest questions around Rasuwa are geographical: Where are we building towns, laying roads, and placing power plants?

Over recent decades, infrastructure has steadily encroached onto lower riverbanks and active floodplains. While older communities historically built on higher ground to avoid active river channels, modern land-use planning frequently ignores these natural boundaries. Bringing local and indigenous geographical knowledge back into modern engineering decisions is a practical starting point for adaptation.

Anjal Prakash, Professor of Public Policy at FLAME University and an IPCC author, points out that the region does not suffer from a lack of science. Researchers have tracked retreating glaciers, changing permafrost, and rising snowlines for decades. The failure, he argues, lies in policy— translating well-documented risks into smarter zoning and construction choices.

A regional disaster cannot be managed country by country

The Rasuwa crisis also demonstrates why disaster planning cannot stop at national borders. The affected river systems cross international boundaries, the failure originated near the Nepal-China border, and the resulting debris washed through multiple downstream jurisdictions.

The World Meteorological Organization points to this as a clear example of cascading transboundary hazards. Aarti Khosla, Director of Climate Trends, similarly notes that risks across the Hindu Kush Himalaya affect India and neighboring countries equally, requiring joint approaches to monitoring, early warning, and climate adaptation.

Data sharing across borders is essential. A flood warning downstream in one country often relies on sensor data from upstream in another. When development choices or infrastructure failures in one nation can trigger impacts across the border, regional coordination becomes a necessity rather than an option.

The future risk is not just more floods

Disaster risk in the Himalayas is often oversimplified into a single concept: Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs).

GLOFs are a major threat, but the vocabulary needs to expand. The mountains face ice falls, rockslides, landslide-dammed rivers, debris flows, and slope failures—often interacting all at once. An avalanche blocks a river; the temporary dam holds back water until it breaches; the resulting torrent sweeps up massive amounts of rock and earth; the debris wipes out bridges and monitoring equipment, leaving downstream teams blind to what is coming next. Preparing for mountain hazards means preparing for these linked multi-stage events, not just isolated floods.

What preparedness should look like now

A practical response requires pairing early-warning technology with long-term climate adaptation:

• Diversify warning networks: Expand river sensors, satellite tracking, and local alert channels where lead time exists, while planning for events that offer no notice at all.

• Update zoning and land use: Base building regulations on dynamic river and slope modeling rather than static historical maps.

• Mandate life-cycle risk assessments: Require infrastructure projects to factor in climate and cryosphere projections over their entire intended lifespan.

• Build system redundancy: Ensure communications, transit routes, and monitoring stations have backups so a single failure point doesn’t collapse an entire emergency response.

• Integrate local knowledge: Use community insights on historical floods and terrain stability alongside satellite and scientific data.

• Formalize transboundary cooperation: Share real-time hydrological, seismic, and weather data across international borders.

The mountains are changing. Policy must catch up.

The long-term outlook for the region is stark. Under high-emissions scenarios, Himalayan glaciers could lose over 60% of their volume by 2100; even moderate scenarios project losses of up to 35%.

These projections outline a fundamental transformation of the mountain environment. Glacial retreat initially leads to periods of higher runoff—”peak water”—followed by declining long-term water availability, directly impacting farming, drinking water, and energy production across South Asia.

As UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell has noted, rising temperatures are making severe mountain disasters more frequent. In the Himalayas, the core issue is that expanding human settlements and multi-million-dollar infrastructure projects are sitting in the path of a rapidly changing landscape designed around historical climate assumptions.

When a mountain moves without warning, safety relies entirely on decisions made years or decades before the collapse happens.